


echoes of a city that's long overgrown

by khlassique



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-12
Updated: 2012-04-12
Packaged: 2017-11-03 12:59:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/381604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khlassique/pseuds/khlassique





	echoes of a city that's long overgrown

He feels that, here, he will always be the fool, the boy stumbling into the camp he should not, begging for forgiveness. Not from the wide grey eyes of a boy, but the deep blue eyes of a girl betrayed.

 

And he will always, _always_ , be first rejected.

 

_We can’t trust him! Not after Ba Sing Se._

_  
_

His sister’s voice will worm into his thoughts. _You’re just the little broken fool who didn’t take the gift I gave. You deserve to be abandoned._

_  
_

And the orphan boy with the world in his hands will convince his companions otherwise, always.

 

Those blue eyes will never trust him first, ever.

 

They will follow him, threaten him, and though she is smaller, he will always be frightened of the ferocity.

 

His sister’s voice, again, sneering- _approval from a peasant. You’re pathetic._

_  
_

She is a lioness, and the boy her cub.

 

He is an interloper, and it is not until she snatches him from the sky- for his sister will always find them- that he thinks that, maybe, he is not as much an intruder anymore. He will at least hope.

 

He will always wait outside of her tent while the moon crawls across the sky, and she will always be ready to throw the comb at him when he makes an offer. The little orphan boy will try to stop them because his way is the _peaceful_ way (weak. It is the _weak_ way.), and she will cut him down because she is _vengeance_. Anger that had festered for half a lifetime, anger meant to kill and take and destroy.

 

They will always slip onto the ship as quiet as nighttime, and he will always wonder how she could have so much power. Her rage makes her unstoppable. It makes her beautiful under the moonlight.

 

This will always be her element, after all, for all she healed and helped and cared, there would always be anger. Yin and yang. Restoration and destruction.

 

She will never be able to kill the pathetic monster in the mud, though the ice daggers will scrape a thrashing pulse. That is the first time he will want to kiss her, hold her close and whisper that she did what he could not.

 

He never will, though.

 

His sister’s voice- _Pathetic_. 

 

She will forgive him after their trip. They don’t talk about it with the others; it is like Ba Sing Se, secrets forever sealed up in stone.

 

The comet will always come, and he will always face the voice inside his head. _Pathetic, traitor, worthless, broken, failure- dying for a peasant._

_  
_

But she will never be just a peasant. She is rage, and water, and moonlight, and kindness, and-

 

The lightening will always hit him, then. It will be always be blue and brilliant and he thinks that this must be the _sun_.

 

She will always heal him.

 

Here is where the _always_ stops, he knows, where the paths diverged and _always_ faded into _maybe_ which then whispered _possibly_.

 

Sometimes, she will kiss him when he wakes. They grow older and marry and fight the yin and yang within them, but they will be happy because they have worked for it, and it is theirs to claim.

 

Sometimes, she will not. She will grow older and marry the orphan boy with the world in his hands and they will not have to fight the yin and yang within them, so their happiness is easier to take.

 

_You will always be the fool, Zuzu._


End file.
